Posts tagged content strategy
The profound power of five blog readers
May 6th
At the recent Social Slam conference, there was a ton of inspiring content from some of the greatest marketing minds around. And yet to me, the sentence from the day-long conference that has lingered in my mind came from the least-known speaker of the day. She is not a marketer. She is not a social media expert. In fact, Social Slam was the first social media conference she had ever attended.
I invited Dr. Alice Ackerman, a pediatrician and college educator from Virginia Tech University, to relate her inspiring story of how she was connecting to her community through social media. She told the audience of her introduction to the social web through The Tao of Twitter and of her struggles to get approval to blog from the university medical community. She persevered and eventually got the go-ahead, but finding an audience for her blog posts was another matter.
Much of her first blogging efforts were aimed at educating the community on the importance of childhood vaccinations. But she had some doubt as to whether she was making an impact. She displayed a chart displaying the lowly results of her blogging efforts. For more than a year, her posts limped along. In fact, she averaged 4.5 readers a day.
And then something magical happened when she received this tweet:
Dr. Ackerman is the person who changed my mind once I read her blog and her links. I had no idea that info existed.
And it was at this point that Dr. Ackerman delivered the line at the conference that received a thunderous applause from all the hard-working bloggers in attendance:
“Yes, I only had 4.5 readers a day on my blog … but I had an impact on one of them.”
I thought this was a profound lesson on many levels.
- “Citizen Influencers” are using the power of online publishing tools to make a difference in unexpected ways
- You never know when your words are making an impact
- Tenacity, commitment, and patience make the difference in social media success
I think this is an inspiring message for any blogger out there. What do you think? Are you making a difference in big and small ways?
For social media success, write, then IGNITE. Here’s how.
Mar 18th
I recently did some volunteer work for a national charity and provided counsel on their social media strategy. The PR Agency started the meeting by listing all of the “messaging” being developed to support a major fund-raising push in 2012. The list looked something like this:
- Press releases
- Podcast
- Promotional video
- Slideshow
- Photos and videos from local events
- Clips from local TV stations
They’re off to a good start because there is the potential for a lot of interesting content here. But ultimately the effort will fail as merely a blip on the radar because nobody in the organization is working on the network strategy. Developing content for the social web is a waste of time if it just sits there like a bump on a Heinz dill pickle. It has to go some place if it is to attract attention and eventually compel people to do something.
To ignite a social strategy, you must ignite your content.
So to be successful, you must aggressively develop the “human pathways” that will carry your content to the world … not just write press releases that you HOPE will be buried on a community events calendar somewhere. And the larger — and more engaged — the network, the better the chances for success, so get started NOW!
Here is an action plan I provided to this charity that would result in long-term success … and it can ONLY be long-term success because it takes TIME and CONSISTENT EFFORT to build a relevant and engaged network that will share your stuff!
1) Identify all the passionate advocates of the charity. They are a powerful and critical first step in building an engaged network.
2) Explain to them why you need their help and the benefits of helping — you’re connecting many small networks to create an enormous network.
3) Teach them how to proactively and aggressively build a targeted network and a social media presence so that you have hundreds of “beacons” for your brand.
4) Give this group tips on how to effectively share, connect, and network on their favorite social platforms.
5) Assign a central resource to “corral” real, passionate stories, videos, photos from the field to share across the ENTIRE network. Unleash the content! This will provide a constant drip-drip-drip of interesting content every week.
6) Make the content easy to share. Have easy-to-find social sharing options. Use Linked Within (like I do at the bottom of each post) to highlight similar stories of interest (this increases my page views by about 8 percent). Highlight other content of interest on the site.
7) Institute free, simple monitoring tools like Google Alerts and saved Twitter searches to measure the effort and identify the most successful networks and content. “Buzz” is a leading indicator of donations. If the buzz is going, up, up, up, the donations will eventually follow.
I care about this cause so I’m going to try to shepherd this as best I can. Hopefully it will work. Does this make sense to you? What other advice would you give this worthy cause?
Marketing, Journalism, and Truth as Competitive Advantage
Nov 27th
I had a very interesting question come across my desk from {grow} community member John Bethune:
In the minds of most people, journalism and marketing were once diametrically opposed. Has that changed in the social media era?
A great question! And, in fact, I think the social web has brought these disciplines together in a number of surprising ways.
The ideal of journalism is a quest for truth. Marketing is the quest for a product’s “truth.” By that I mean the best marketers are on a journey to know how their company’s goods and services exist in the hearts and minds of their customers. Then, their job is to express that consumer truth to the best of their ability. So in this way, the disciplines are unexpectedly similar, although the end product is quite different!
But the social web has created an important shift for both disciplines. What does it even mean to be a journalist today? Through blogging and technology like smartphone video cameras, journalism has been democratized. Anybody can report, anybody can publish. Jeff Jarvis of City University of New York recently defined a reporter today as simply somebody who can say, “I was there and you weren’t.”
The democratization of marketing
To a great extent, marketing has been democratized, too. Remember last year when Gap changed their logo and there was such an outcry? I felt empathy for the company because they are probably good marketers who followed a traditional protocol — work with graphic designers, test it, get feedback, and roll. That system has worked for decades and changing a logo is not an easy or flippant decision for a consumer product company to make. I’m sure they had done their homework … or at least they thought so.
But a few vocal people thought the new logo was stupid (perhaps people who were not even customers!). Through Twitter and Facebook, they created an anti-logo movement. and suddenly it became an embarrassing meme. I can imagine the Gap marketers waking up to this one morning and thinking “Wait … what?”
So something as important as an adjustment to your brand image may not even be in the hands of marketers any more. The Gap’s marketing strategy had essentially been crowd-sourced! Like journalism it seems, marketing has also been democratized.
Content as power
The production of content has also been an output of the marketing process, usually in the form of advertisements. But now content is at the very centerpiece of many strategies as companies fight to attract attention on the crowded social web. The journalism schools are full of new applicants. Why? Because content is big business now and the new media channels have an insatiable need for it. Companies need story-tellers as much as marketing graduates.
I have recently been working with the president of one of my B2B customers on a blog and a series of how-to videos to demonstrate their new robotic technologies. I’ll bet five years ago he never would have dreamed he would be in the publishing business!
So this idea of content and storytelling is another way that journalism and marketing have been brought together. For both fields, content that moves virally through the social web represents success and power.
Truth as a strategy
I think expectations of “truth” and transparency is another way the social web have brought journalism and marketing together. For a brand to have integrity and to be successful, it can’t be spinning the truth around any more. There are a million watch dogs out there now and any one of them can sniff out a fake.
A few weeks ago, I was working with some marketers for a hotel chain and we were discussing negative hotel reviews. “We don’t mind them,” they told me. “It makes us more real.”
Interesting. Truth as a marketing strategy.
My hunch is that a few years ago, that is not necessarily what their reaction would have been. In marketing, truth is the new black.
Maybe journalism and marketing are getting closer than we thought? What do you think?
Note: John Bethune’s full interview with me can be found here: “Content is Power: A Q&A with Mark W. Schaefer.”
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
Groups We Believe In
